Question

Somebody is sending me patches generated by “git format-patch”.

Is there a gui (on linux) that can open these .patch files?

I’ve tried many diff gui but all they do is compare two existing files/folders. None can display the patch, except kompare which spits a “The diff is malformed. Some lines could not be parsed and will not be displayed in the diff view.” everytime.

Answer 1

They’re pretty easy to read, but if you want to see the entire context of the file, the best way is to apply them with git-am:

git am foo.patch
git difftool ORIG_HEAD

If you like it, it’s already committed. If not:

git reset --hard ORIG_HEAD